In this episode, Sarah and Caitlyn talk with Dr. Dong Dinh, who is the Director of First at DU, and an alum of both the Higher Education Master and EdD programs at the University of Denver. We talk about serving first-generation students, how first-gen supports must span the whole college experience, and reflecting on those who have helped to support us in our journeys.  

About our guest: Dr. Dong Dinh graduated from DU with both his MA and EdD in Higher Education. He identifies as a queer Vietnamese American and concentrates his research and expertise in supporting historically underrepresented students with a specialty focus on Asian American and first-generation student populations. He is an avid adventurer and spends much of his time on an outrigger canoe. 

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Thanks for listening to this episode of Mile Higher Ed. Mile Higher Ed is produced within the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver by Dr. Sarah Hurtado and Caitlyn Potter Glaser.  Our theme music is “Summer” by Liborio Conti.  

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Keep up the good work everyone. See you next time! 

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Episode Transcript 

Sarah Hurtado: Welcome back to Mile Higher Ed, the podcast where we share stories, ideas, and experiences in higher education research and practice, all from the voices of DU higher ed faculty, students, and alumni. I’m one of your hosts, Dr. Sarah Hurtado, Associate Professor in the DU Higher Ed Department, and, as always, I’m here with my co-host: 

Caitlyn Glaser: Hi, I’m Caitlyn Potter Glaser. I’m a PhD student in higher education here at DU. 

Sarah: And today, we are so excited to talk with Dr. Dong Dinh, who is the Director of FIRST at DU, and a two-time DU Higher Ed alum graduating both from our master’s and EdD programs. So, welcome Dong! 

Dong Dinh: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here, and I’m excited to join you in this podcast. 

Sarah: Thanks. We are also very excited to chat with you. Our first question is kind of a standard we ask everyone. Tell us about your journey. What led you here to DU? What inspired you to do the EdD program? And, you know, all that fun stuff! 

Dong: Yeah, yeah, awesome question. It helps me reflect about who I am, what I stand for, and go back to the beginnings of my childhood, would you say? I’ve been in higher education for about over 10 years. Wow. I feel a little dated. But a little over 10 years, and I think it started, like, similar to many other students going into higher education. I had a Resident Director, Chen Du, and I was on Hall Council, I was super involved. And he pulled me aside one day and said, “Hey, do you want to do student affairs? I think you’ll be great.” At the time, being first-generation, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what my career looked like, I didn’t know what major I wanted to do, and I’m like, anything that someone complimented me about, I’m like, I’m gonna take it, I’m gonna run with it.  

So, and it helped, you know, that talk helped me identify the different parts of campus that serve students, whether that was the programming office, the Multicultural Center at my undergrad (I went to Western Washington University), really allowed me to thrive by being club officers, work-study, working for different parts of campus and the office, and to see people who look like me, and had similar backgrounds, and seeing tull-time staff and faculty serve them, too. So that really piqued my interest. 

I think over the couple years afterwards, I really got engaged into this internationalization, study abroad era, where I wanted to be a diplomat and a Foreign Service officer, and you know, I studied abroad twice in my undergraduate career. One in Chile and, went for 2 quarters at the time, 6 months, and then I did an internship with EducationUSA and was put into a place called Estonia in the Baltic Sea, near Finland. And you know, we in that internship really talked about how to get into U.S. higher education’s systems from a international lens and advise students, and advise folks whose English was a second language. And although Foreign Service was fun, I realized my heart belonged in higher education, and at the time I applied… I knew I wanted to do student affairs at that point. So, at the time, I reply to various universities, and DU was one of was on my radar for a master’s program. I was really attracted to DU’s Higher Education Master’s program because of their inclusive excellence lens and approach to their teaching methodologies. 

You know, that was years ago, where Inclusive Excellence was the thing to do, and I think there’s still elements in the higher education program where inclusive excellence is touted. Yes, it’s called something different, but a social justice lens is still of being taught in the higher education program. 

And after I was done with my master’s, I did conduct for my graduate assistantships for 2 years, and conduct taught me a lot, and realized that what I needed and wanted for myself in higher education, was to become better to support first-generation college students, minoritized, marginalized students, students who wanted to be involved in leadership, and I needed a doctorate to kind of do that work. And so, I applied to the EdD program, because honestly, there was nothing on the table. I applied to many jobs at the time. I think jobs were just really hard to find in 2019. And there was great faculty in the higher education program at DU. And so, it was an easy decision to want to go back to education, to get more education.  

Sarah: I really love asking this question, even to people that I know. I’ve known you for many years now, Dong. Because I did not know about your two study abroad stints, that’s really cool! Yeah, so I just… I’m like, oh, these are really fun things, but I also really love the hearing about many of our guests have this story of, like, someone who inspired them, or reached out and told them, like, “You would be really great at this,” and like, I have a similar story. Many of our guests have a similar story, and it just feels good thinking about the impact that people like us have had on us. That means we’re probably having that impact on other people, which is really amazing. So, thanks for sharing a little bit about that. 

Dong: Of course, and it takes a couple years to kind of reflect and be like, “You were important in my life, you were important in my life. “And now I can say that after 10 years.  

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, I love it.  

Caitlyn: Now, when you have the benefit of hindsight, you can really see how all the dots connect, and those people who influence you that maybe in the moment weren’t so obvious, but it becomes clear when you look back. I love that. Your reflection’s leading us to now. You are the Director of First at DU. Can you talk more about this program, as well as the work you do in that role? 

Dong: Of course. This is an area that I’m really passionate about, because I get to see myself in the work. And I use classroom theories and practices and things I learned from the classroom to apply to my position. So, I’ve been, as the Director of First at DU for about 3 years now, before I was a program coordinator in the office, and I had a little stint of being a firefighter right after my doctorate program. In this program, First at DU used to be called Access and Transition, where we help support students, right, accessing higher education, and then transitioning them to different parts of their lives as a student and beyond their student journey here at DU. We really concentrate on the undergraduate student experience, just because I would say the main student experience at DU, while we understand we want to expand graduate student experiences, I would say the university does it in pockets, not as a cohesion, er cohesive effort. And, no, things are changing around that, but let’s talk about the program. 

I oversee the First-Generation Student Experience, so what that means is that there are four components to the program: One is, kind of the first-gen family component. Thinking about how do we get first-gen families on board with their first-gen students, and that starts with our orientation programs. We engage with families, we talk them through best practices, or how to contact, and some of the challenges that presents when maybe their students are not contacting them, or they’re busy with lives in school, and understanding there is cultural familiarity and knowledge and expectations that happens from the home. So, we have to understand that, too, and when incorporating those into our workshops or lenses.  

We also look at, as a first-generation kind of experience, we look at programming that really suits them in their success. So, we help them identify what markers of success do you define or identify? Of course, many of them, because they are first-generation college students, their markers of success is graduating from college, getting that diploma. Because as we know, getting a diploma equals many advantages to fiscal responsibility, opportunities, job placement, career placements, as well as setting and knowledge. How to study, how to critically think. There’s a lot of things that go into it, but mainly for first-gen students, success looks at graduating from college.  

We do just-in-time programming, as well as our signature programming. Just-in-time programming looks like, what do they need in this moment in time? What’s happening in the world that may we need to make space for that? For example, financial aid before was open after October 1st, now it’s open kind of early. So, we’ve kind of pivoted our programming to be like, Hey, drop-in hours, we’re working with financial aid, how do we get you the information you need to get financial aid next year early on? And then what taxes and forms you need to collect, um to do your financial aid form or CSS profiles, to do that early on, rather than later, when it’s kind of crunch time to do.  

I also oversee the One Gen U program. This is a cohort-based program where it started everything for us. We offer mentorship, uh, and an experience to live together in housing. We do pre-orientation. And these first-years through the program, it’s a four-year program, meet with us one-on-one just to check in with them, make sure that they know someone’s in their corner. And this program has been in existence for about nine years or so, started by Alfredo Gallegos, and that, because of that program, it accelerated the creation of First at DU, because it was so successful, it had 95% retention and a persistence rate. For a couple years, from 2017 to 2018, it was 100% persistence and retention rate. 

Caitlyn: Wow. 

Dong: So, we know that the program worked. And we have about 120 students in the program. And so, we are trying to duplicate those efforts to all first-gen, and there’s about a thousand first-gen students on DU’s campus that are undergraduate level. 

Sarah: Yeah, that’s pretty significant, I mean, I think the general retention rate across DU is, like, 89%, which is already pretty good. So, if these programs are hitting, like, 99–100%, that is amazing, Dong. That must feel really good to be part of that. 

Dong: Yes, yeah, and I think my team, one of them is a higher ed alumni, as well, that I supervise. And so, I have a fantastic team that does the work. We share the load, and we share the emotional barriers or emotional burdens that come with some of the positions that we have.  

Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Kind of along those lines, you talked kind of broadly about the program. It sounds like you’re doing, as an institution, really good work with this group of students. Can you talk a little bit more about what it actually looks like when you’re supporting a student, right? Like, we have the programs, but, like, what are your interactions with students looking like? What is that, what is that experience like?  

Dong: Yeah, so, uh, again, it starts on the first day on campus, right? How we table, how we interact with families are very important, how we pull them in. It starts first year of campus, we send an email saying, “Hey, come meet with us, come chat. We’re here to support you.” Some folks do take that offer, I would say? Yeah, I would say quite a bit of students come by. We try different initiatives to get them in. 

When I do get them in my office, one of the biggest initiatives that I am have done and started to propose is this First-Gen Roadmap. And with this first-gen roadmap, we talk about at what point in your student career journey should you be hitting milestones? Right, so for your first year, maybe it’s all about navigation, getting the lay of the land, cultivating a sense of belonging, making sure that you are celebrated for your first year.  Second year, we really look at how do you prep for your major and interest in your career? How do you explore? How do you find new things and new opportunities? Yes, they’re doing a lot of new things in their first year, but a lot of times they’re surviving in their first year, and be like, “Alright, this is maybe what I need, maybe not what I need, maybe I need to explore new things.” Second year’s like, “Okay, I know myself. How do I explore more opportunities that feel like me?”  

I talk about in their third year I talk about grad school already, just because if you want grad school paid for, right, you gotta look pretty early at what institutions provide graduate support in terms of funding. We talk about their career journey, right, in partnership with the career office. How do you do internships? How do you look at job descriptions that you may be passionate about, that other people have, and work backwards from there. We do mind mapping from there. We talk about study abroad. What does it look like to be first-gen, leaving home again, right? Maybe you left home the first year, but this is international waters. It’s gonna be a lot different, maybe it’s in another language, or a language that you may be familiar with. It’s gonna be a cultural barrier shock, so how do you understand being the first again, abroad.  

And what’s interesting about DU’s study abroad going for undergraduate. It’s pretty high. I believe it’s over 85% of undergraduate who study abroad, when we compare that to first-gen folks, it’s I want to say, at one point it was about 30% of first-gen folks who were going abroad. So, it’s a big gap that we were trying to help students understand that this is an opportunity. Yes, you have some family obligations, but how do you work with your families and help your families understand that this experience is one of the high-impact practices that you can have, on your college journey?  

And then for the fourth year, because it’s a four-year kind of program concentrating undergraduate experience, we look at what’s next, how do you reflect on your collegiate career? What’s next in store for you after graduation, whether that’s more schooling, whether that’s careers. How do you stay connected with your undergraduate school, like DU, through connections with alumni office. Maybe you don’t even know about services that are offered to you. Like, you can go to the Career Center still as a first-year alumni. Or, how do you create intentional relationships that last forever? So, we talk about some of those aspects. 

Sarah: That is super cool. That is very robust, and yeah. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness across their entire time at DU, right, I think a lot of times it’s like, “Oh, you’re first-gen, you come here as a first-year student, and then cool, you’re good.” But you’re first gen the entire time, right? Like, until you graduate, you’re still you know, trying to figure out the entire college experience, so it sounds like you’re doing an awesome job supporting them through all of it. 

Dong: Thank you. And what’s been really cool to look at is our office has been, like, a trendsetter. Right? And in part because we listen to students. Students nowadays want someone to tell them what to do. So we provided this roadmap to be like, Here are the things that you need to do, tight? But you can do it in your own way. And so it creates flexibility, as well as, like I’m not lost, I don’t need to use ChatGPT to come up with my own journey. 

Sarah: Yeah, that’s funny. 

Caitlyn: Well, and I appreciate, too, how much you’ve talked about bringing in families and including families in this process. I think some students can arrive on a college campus and they want that independence and that autonomy, but other students arrive, then they arrive with their family in a very important and meaningful way, and I think that’s just a positive evolution in how we work with students, too, is to embrace their families and help their families as well. So, I just that’s something I’ve been thinking about as you’ve been talking about the supports and just how important that is thinking of students holistically, too. Something I don’t think I thought much about. 

Dong: Families, yeah. And I think what really helped me kind of understand the context of families was in the curriculum with the EdD program, and with the master’s program, we talked a lot about funds of knowledge. Alright, so Judy Kiyama was a professor here at DU for a little bit, and we talk about how familial cultural knowledge, whether it’s cultural, whether it’s through connections with family, are really important that you bring with you into a college campus. So, I think traditional thinking of families really say that we gotta be independent, you gotta wash your own clothes, you gotta do all this by yourself, but in reality, the journey, it’s impossible to be like, I’m not gonna talk to you when I’m 18 and going to college. 

Sarah: Right. 

Dong: Right? You’re still my family, right? And some of that’s the case for families, but we want to bring them. That’s what makes our student population so great, like, they bring so much expertise and diversity and cultural knowledge and backgrounds to the spaces that kind of make the student experience. Because without that, our schools would be bland. 

Caitlyn: Oh, absolutely.  

Dong: It would be just academic, and there wouldn’t be anything fun to do. 

Sarah: Yeah, that’s true. 

Caitlyn: I’m thinking, too, just holistically and treating whole people, whole students, whole identities, whole staff, employees, this is a challenging time to work in higher education right now. And so, Dong, I’d love to know more about what keeps you going, what keeps you inspired? 

Dong: Yeah, so this year has been especially tough for those who do really intentional work around diversity, and including us in First-Gen, right? Because when we take a look at intersectional identities within First-Gen, they’re just a lot of folks don’t identify as first-gen first, they identify as a person of color, gender, sexuality, they identify as something else first, and then first-gen kind of comes into the side. I think what has been really tough this year was the constant changes, and we all know that higher education changes slowly. But this year has been especially change-heavy with policy on the national level, on the state level, on the institutional level, and that’s why it’s so important to understand organizational context, plug for EdD classwork, right? It has been really frustrating to see multiple places across higher education defunded, rebranded, hidden, or gotten rid of altogether, and, you know, I’m part of the First-Gen Network through, through the first gen org. We see TRiO offices that are defunded, or places that used to support first-gen efforts are no longer there, or called something else. For me, if you walk in my office in my suite, we see it filled with many different people. Like, you don’t see that on campus. Like, people don’t really hang around very much, unless it’s lunchtime at the at the cafeteria. Our office is filled constantly, and people are speaking multiple languages, they’re meeting with their mentors, mentee, graduate students are stopping by. So, that keeps me going, because we have cultivated a space where students can be themselves and thrive. And if they need help, they are two feet away from our office and they keep us young! Like, one of the reasons why I love higher education, because I get to be young every day with students, right? It doesn’t feel like I’m a I’m an adult yet? Like, a full-time adult. Yes, I have responsibilities to service and support adults, but at the same time, I’m like, I’m going through the same journey as you all, just in a different time and space. 

Sarah: I love that. Yeah, I love students for that reason. I love being around students, because, yeah, I feel like just see the things that are important to them, or you know even just walking across campus and overhearing, like, funny conversations, I’m like, ugh, to be young. They’re having so much fun, and, like, doing cool stuff all the time. I love being around it. 

Dong: And it’s really rewarding to see, you see a cohort of students in their first year, and then their fourth year. They’re, they’ve grown so much, and I’m like, Wow, I’m very proud of you. You get to this point in your lives, and I know that after you graduate, we won’t talk very much, but it’s so awesome to see how they flourished throughout the years. Whether it’s, like, they battled some really hardships throughout their careers, or and some exciting things that we get to catch up on that we haven’t seen maybe in maybe a year or two.  

Sarah: Yeah. And, I mean, going back to our very beginning of our conversation, in 10 years, they’re going to be like, “Ugh, Dong, He was so important to my life!” 

You have already shared a little bit about this, and I’ve heard, like, bits and pieces in your answers, but can you tell us how you have used what you learned in your coursework from the DU Higher Ed program in your practice?  

Dong: Yeah, yeah, so the DU Higher Ed program is very intentional in the ways that they support kind of two directions. One is well, I guess many directions, but for me, it was two directions. One: How do I become a better practitioner, a staff member, leader in the career that I want to be in? It allows for critical thinking of how/what can we solve today? Right? And if we can’t solve today, what are some steps that we can take through readings, through discussions, through interviews, research methods, to answer these questions. So that really helped me become a better practitioner. I think assessment was one of the biggest entryways to higher education full-time positions as a staff. Because a lot of folks in higher education do assessment, but don’t do assessment well. Right, so how do we…so, the coursework, right, it was, like, an assessment and I think we’re just assessment in higher education taught me about the ins and outs of different methodologies of assessments, how do you conduct assessment with a partnering office, or kind of a case study type vibe. And that landed my first job at DU doing 4D, like, the four-dimensional, work, and that was a campus-wide initiative, right? Worked for the Chancellor, worked for the Provost, and assessment landed me that job, so really grateful for that.  

I would also say outside of the program, you develop this sense of connection, and social network. The EdD program brings in a lot of guest speakers that you can connect with in the course. I think, and, right, one of the reasons why I had a full-time job was one of the professors recommended me to this position, because she saw the work that I was producing in class, and she’s like, “I think you’ll be great. Let me connect to you.” And, alright, my second job, too, let me connect you, I’m like, it was always the faculty providing some type of connection or skill set that I needed to become the practitioner I am today. And they allow me to come back to the classroom as a guest speaker to talk about some of the expertise that I’ve done on my journey inside the classroom and outside the classroom. Like, you’re always going to be connected to higher education, whether you want to or not, because the faculty are always wanting to see you and get connected, and want to so you become, right, a leader in this career field. So, they’re giving you tons of opportunities to give back to do presentations, podcasts like this, so, it has been appreciative, and pretty awesome, in fact that I’ve been able to attend DU in that space. 

Sarah: I love having you as my guest speaker. I think I’ve had you probably, like, every year come back as a guest speaker but I feel like you’re just so fun, and students really appreciate learning from you, so… 

Dong: Thank you. 

Caitlyn: You talked a little bit about some of the courses and how you’ve used some of the coursework. Is there a project, or an assignment, or a memorable course that you haven’t yet talked about that you had while in either program, the master’s or the EdD program, that you want to talk about now? 

Dong: Yeah, yeah, so I think going into the master’s program and EdD program, I knew what I wanted to do but at the same time, I didn’t. 

Caitlyn: Sure. I feel that. 

Dong: And I’m gonna be honest, right? When I interviewed for the EdD program with a faculty member, listed three things, and you know, I did I had how to define, but not really defined, but, current issues, which was a course designed to help us understand what are the current issues in higher education, what are the populations that we need to understand that are happening to the population in higher education, and it allowed me to really focus on what I wanted to do for my dissertation and practice. So, Mike Hoa Nguyen, Dr. Nguyen, Dr. Mike, taught this Current Issues class, and for me, he was a mentor who allowed me to reflect on who I was as an Asian American man, and what I wanted to do to contribute to my own community. So he allowed me to research AANAPISIs, so Asian American serving institutions, uh, which because of some policies, uh, no longer are funded. And with that, I was able to kind of sift through some of the data that was existing through AANAPISIs, sifted through some of the student experience that serves Asian American students and come out with a final product of a literature review. So, I presented on Asian Americans in higher education, specifically at AANAPISIs, and that helped me get onto Dr. Nguyen’s research team. So, I was able to publish, I was able to write, I was able to meet colleagues around the U.S. to do this work. And I think at the same time, I was doing a full-time job while doing coursework, so I was able to both apply what I was learning in the classroom with analyzing data, researching, to the population I was serving, right? I was serving as a mentor, an advisor a niche population at DU so it was a combination of, like, projects to service.  

Sarah: I really love hearing about your, how you’ve applied, like you’ve talked about theories, you’ve talked about, like, very tangible skills like assessment and analysis and all of these things, and you’ve applied it in lots of different ways, in research and in practice which is exactly what we want our students to do. So, thank you for doing the good work, and making us all proud.  

Dong: Yeah, I’m thankful for the professors at this, in this program, and we can see how much care and intention the higher education faculty and program have designed their courses to be able to help us excel in our careers in higher education. Or not, yeah, outside of higher education, but mainly in higher education. 

Sarah: In whatever career you strive for! Well, thank you so much, Dong. I have always appreciate chatting with you, but also just learning more about the great work you’re doing for students here at DU. I am so grateful that you’re here doing that work. I know the students are so grateful and I appreciate that you, you know, keep fighting the good fight doing the good work. So, thanks! 

Dong: Thank you. Yes, thanks for having me today. 

Sarah: Yes, and thanks to all of our listeners. 

[music and end credits] 

Thanks for listening to this episode of Mile Higher Ed. Mile Higher Ed is produced within the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver by Dr. Sarah Hurtado and Caitlyn Potter Glaser.  Our theme music is “Summer” by Liborio Conti.  

Are you interested in a master’s or doctoral degree in higher education? Come join us! Links to information about our degree programs, as well as links to the things we talked about today, are in this episode’s show notes. 

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